Why?

“I’m not sure yet,” I said. “But I’m damned well going to find out.”

Chapter

Nine

“Cat Sith,” I called, once Sarissa had left.

From behind me, a voice said, “Yes, Sir Knight?”

I twitched and didn’t whirl around like a frightened teenager. I turned in a very urbane and James Bondian fashion, in keeping with my tux, eyed him, and said, “Hell’s bells. Do you always come in like that?”

“No,” the malk replied. He was sitting on the back of the sofa Sarissa and I had recently vacated. “Generally I do not speak. I simply proceed.”

“Are you aware of my orders?” I asked.

“I am aware that you have been given orders. I am to facilitate your ability to comply with them.”

I nodded. “I need to get back to Chicago. Right now. And I need a car.”

Cat Sith turned and padded down the hallway, toward my bedroom. He stopped in the hall at the door to the linen closet and lashed his tail once, then looked at me. “Very well.”

I frowned at him. Then I went to the closet and opened the door.

Autumn air, humid and smothering compared to that of Arctis Tor, flooded into my lair. Brilliant lights shone on the other side of the door, and it took me a few seconds of blinking against them to adjust, and realize that I was being blinded by simple streetlights. Inside my closet, there was a bit of sidewalk and then Michigan Avenue stretching out to the storefront opposite.

I blinked several times. Sith had opened a Way between Faerie and Chicago.

The spirit world, the Nevernever, is vast almost beyond imagining. Faerie is but one part of it, for the most part occupying the realms of spirit that lie most adjacent to the mortal world. The geography of the spirit world isn’t like that of the real world. Different places in the spirit world will connect with places with a similar energy in the real world. So dark, spooky parts of the Nevernever hook up with dark, spooky places in the mortal world.

And my freaking linen closet in Arctis Tor hooked up to Chicago—specifically to Michigan Avenue, to the Gothic stone building across the street from the Old Historic Water Tower. It was night. Cars went by occasionally, but no one seemed to take notice of the open portal to the heart of Winter. Arctis Tor was isolated in the Nevernever, difficult to reach without inside help. Even traveling by Ways takes at least some time, and I’d expected a hike back to the real world.

“How?” I asked quietly.

“Her Majesty had it made,” Sith said.

I whistled. Intentionally forming a connection from a specific place to a specific place took amounts of energy so enormous that even the White Council of Wizards could rarely manage it—I’d seen it done only once in my lifetime, the year before, in Chichén Itzá. “She had it made? For me?”

“Indeed,” Sith said. “In fact, this is, for the time being, the only way in or out of Faerie.”

I blinked several times. “You mean Winter?”

“Faerie,” Sith stated. “All of it.”

I choked. “Wait. You mean all of Faerie is on lockdown?”

“Indeed,” Sith said. “Until dawn.”

“Why?” I asked.

“One presumes it was done to give you a head start.” With that, Sith walked calmly through the door and onto the sidewalk. “Your car, Sir Knight.”

I stepped through the door into the Chicago air, and it slugged me in the face with a legion of scents and sensations and sounds that were as familiar to me as my own breathing. After the cool, dry silence of Arctis Tor, I felt like I’d leapt into the middle of an active circus. There were too many sounds, scents, too much color, too much motion. Arctis Tor was as still as the deepest night of winter, twenty-four/seven. Chicago is . . . well, Chicago.

I found myself blinking my eyes very rapidly.

Home.

I know. It’s corny. Especially since Chicago is what a polite person would call a colorful place. It’s a den of crime and corruption. And it’s a monument to architecture and enterprise. It’s violent and dangerous, and an epicenter of music and the arts. The good, the bad, the ugly, the sublime, monsters and angels—they’re all here.

The scents and sounds triggered a mental avalanche of memories and I shivered at the intensity of it. I almost didn’t notice the car that pulled up to the curb beside me.

It was an ancient hearse, a Caddy that must have been built sometime in the years immediately following World War II, complete with rounded tail fins. It had been painted dark, dark blue, and given a flame job in shades of electric purple. It wavered and bobbed drunkenly down the avenue, turned a bit too sharply toward the curb, lurched ahead with a roar of the engine, and then skidded to a halt with the brakes locked, missing the posts along the edge of the road, and the chains that hung between them, by maybe an inch.

“Will there be anything else, Sir Knight?” Cat Sith asked.

“Not right now,” I said warily. “Um. Who is driving that thing?”

“I recommend it be you,” Sith said with unmistakable contempt, and then with a swish of his tail, he vanished.

The engine roared once more, and the car lurched but didn’t move from its rest. The lights went on and then off, and then the wipers swept on a few times before the engine dropped to an idle and the brake lights shut off.

I approached the car warily, leaned across the chains, and rapped on the driver’s-side window.

Nothing happened. The windows were tinted a little, enough to make the dark interior invisible on the well-lit street. I couldn’t see anyone inside. I opened the door.

“Three cheers, boys!” piped a tiny cartoon-character voice. “Hip, hip!”

“Hip!” shrilled maybe a dozen more tiny voices.

“Hip, hip!”

“Hip!”

“Hip, hip!”

“Hip!” That was followed by a heartfelt chorus of “Yay!”

Sitting in the driver’s seat of the hearse were a dozen tiny humanoids. Their leader, the largest of them, was maybe eighteen inches tall. He looked like an extremely athletic youth, drawn down to scale. He was dressed in armor made from castoff bits of garbage and refuse. His breastplate had been made from a section of aluminum can, a white one bearing a Coca-Cola logo. The shield on his left arm was made from the same material, this one sporting Coke’s seasonal Christmas polar bears. Part of a plastic toothpaste travel container had been fixed to his belt, and what looked like a serrated butter knife was thrust into it, its handle wrapped in layers of duct tape and string. His hair was violet, a few shades of blue darker than the lavender I remembered, silky, and nearly weightless, drifting around his head like dandelion down. Wings like a dragonfly’s hung from his back like an iridescent cloak.

He was standing atop a formation of smaller sprites stacked up in a miniature human pyramid, and his hands rested on the wheel. Several weary-looking little wee folk were leaning against the gearshift, and several more were on the floor, holding the brake down in a dog pile of tiny bodies. They were all dressed in similar outfits of repurposed garbage.

The leader gave me a sharp salute, beaming. “Major General Toot-toot of the Sir Za Winter Lord Knight’s Guard reporting for duty! It is good to see you, my lord!” His wings buzzed and he fluttered out of the hearse to hover in front of my face, spinning in circles. “Look, look! I got new gear!”

“We’re all Winter and stuff!” piped up one of the smaller members of the guard. He brandished his shield, which was made out of a section of plastic that had come from a solid-stick deodorant container, bearing the words “Winter Clean.”

“Go, Winter!” shouted Toot, thrusting a fist into the air.

“Go, pizza!” echoed the others.

Toot spun around and scowled at them. “No, no, no! We practiced this!”